Vice President
Dick Cheney's Incredible and Deadly Lie

By Deceiving a
Congressional Leader, Cheney Sent Us to War on False
Pretenses and Violated the Separation of Powers - as
Well as the Criminal Law

By
John W. Dean

19/09/08 "FindLaw"
-- - This week, I agreed to deliver a
"Constitution Day" talk on a college campus. My talk
was not partisan. Yet the subject matter I selected
was prompted by the most incredible - not to mention
the most deadly - lie Dick Cheney has yet told,
which was reported earlier this week.

Last year,
Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman and Jo
Baker, now of the New York Times, did an
extensive series for the Post on Cheney. Now,
Gellman has done some more digging, and published
the result in a book he released this week:
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. The
book reveals a lie told to a high-ranking fellow
Republican, and the difference that lie made. In
this column, I'll explain how Cheney defied the
separation of powers, and go back to the founding
history to show why actions like his matter so
profoundly.

Cheney's Bold
Face Lie To Congress

According to Gellman
(and to paraphrase from the Post story on his
finding), in the run-up to the war in Iraq, the
White House was worried about the stance of
Republican Majority Leader Richard Armey of Texas,
who had deep concerns about going to war with Saddam
Hussein. According to the
Post, Armey met with Cheney for a highly
classified, one-on-on briefing, in Room H-208,
Cheney's luxurious hideaway office on the House side
of the Capitol.

During this meeting,
the Post reports, Cheney turned Armey around
on the war issue. Cheney did so by telling the House
Majority Leader that he was giving him information
that the Administration could not tell the public --
namely (according to Armey), that Iraq had the
"'ability to miniaturize weapons of mass
destruction, particularly nuclear,' which had been
'substantially refined since the first Gulf War,'
and would soon result in 'packages that could be
moved even by ground personnel.' In addition, Cheney
linked that threat to Saddam's alleged personal ties
to al Qaeda, explaining that 'we now know they have
the ability to develop these weapons in a very
portable fashion, and they have a delivery system in
their relationship with organizations such as al
Qaeda.'"

The Post
story continues, "Armey has asked: "Did Dick Cheney
... purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?"
His answer: "I seriously feel that may be the
case...Had I known or believed then what I believe
now, I would have publicly opposed [the war]
resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I
might have stopped it from happening."

In short, it was
this lie that sealed the nation's fate, and sent us
to war in Iraq. By lying to such an influential
figure in Congress, Cheney not only may have changed
the course of history, but also corrupted the
separation of powers with their inherent checks and
balances.

Cheney's monumental
dishonesty, the news of which has been buried under
the current meltdown of the nation's economy, did
not strike me as a topic for a Constitution Day
speech. But a realistic discussion of the working of
the separations of powers did seem a fitting topic,
for college students need to understand the basics
of our system. After we remind ourselves of those
basics, Cheney's great lie can be viewed not only as
a great immorality and violation of the criminal
code, but also and more fundamentally as the
significant breach of his oath of office to protect
and defend the Constitution that it is.

Our
Constitutional Separation of Powers

Historians, not to
mention contemporary historical documents, establish
that no issue was more important to the founders of
our national government than that of what its
structure should be. Accordingly, in anticipation of
the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia during
the summer of 1787, James Madison of Virginia plowed
through historical accounts of governments and
concluded that there are three basic forms of
government: monarchy (the one), oligarchy (an elite
few) and democracy (the many). Each form, however,
had serious drawbacks.

As a result, Madison
sought to take the best of each to create a
"republic" - as had been done in varying degrees
with many of the American colonies. Republics, of
course, had been around a long time, for they were
the forms employed by the Greeks and Romans. Thus,
the republic was a form of government those who were
meeting in Philadelphia well understood, in which
sovereignty resides with the people who elect agents
to represent them in the political decision-making
process.

Madison's republic
combined elements of each type of government, in a
mixing of forms. It featured an executive who
incorporated the strength of monarchy without the
evils of a King; a Senate that embodied the wisdom
of an oligarchy; and a House that balanced the
self-interest of such elites with a throng of
representatives who spoke for the people of the
nation.

Many delegates at
the founding convention were mistrustful of a pure
democracy since none had worked well in the past;
moreover, the country was too large and diverse to
directly involve everyone. Later, Madison nicely
explained the differences in Federalist No. 14:
"[I]n a democracy, the people meet and exercise the
government in person; in a republic they assemble
and administer it by their representatives and
agents. A democracy consequently will be confined to
a small spot. A republic may be extended over a
large region."

Most importantly,
Madison's structure had three separate branches of
the government - legislative, executive and judicial
-- and each branch was empowered to check and
balance the others, and thereby diffuse power.

Madison's system,
however, has not worked as designed even in the best
of times, not to mention when there is an
all-powerful Vice President hell-bent on gaming the
system.

The Reality of
Separation of Powers

An article in the
June 2006 Harvard Law Journal --
Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes, "Separation
of Parties, Not Powers," Harvard Law Journal (Jun.
2006) 2311 -- provides one of the better
analyses out there of the real-world workings of the
separation of powers, and their accompanying checks
and balances. Professors Levinson and Pildes argue
that Madison's vision of separation of powers has,
in fact, been trumped in America by political
parties. Their point is well taken, but as I see it
their conclusion is far more applicable to the
Republicans than the Democrats.

"The success of
American democracy overwhelmed the Madisonian
conception of separation of powers almost from the
outset, preempting the political dynamics that were
supposed to provide each branch with a 'will of its
own' that would propel departmental '[a]mbition ...
to counteract ambition'," Levinson and Pildes
explain. This, in turn, they argue, made the
underlying theory of the government - separation of
powers - largely "anachronistic."

When they looked at
government, however, they found that when different
political parties control the different branches -
creating a divided government - then the parties
working through those branches still do operate as
Madison had hoped. Why? By sifting through the work
of noted political scientists, Levinson and Pildes
have concluded that it is not on behalf of
protecting the institutional powers that the
checking and balancing occurs; rather, it is through
the influence of party politics operating through
that divided branch.

I believe, based on
the record (and as someone who worked on the Hill
when Democrats controlled both ends of Pennsylvania
Avenue) that Levinson and Pildes have it half right.

Democrats under
unified government (i.e., when Democrats control
both Congress and the White House) have been
remarkably institutionally-minded, and the
separation of powers has remained viable. On the
other hand, conservative Republicans - as I have
explained in my book
Broken Government (just out in
paperback too) - easily place party loyalty
before the responsibilities of the governmental
institution in which they serve. The first six years
of the Bush/Cheney Administration, for example, were
a travesty in Republican denial of institutional
responsibilities. In contrast, there is a long list
of Democratic House and Senate Chairmen who have a
on-going history of refusing to be the rubber-stamps
of Democratic Presidents.

For instance, unlike
in the situation where Cheney lied to former
Majority Leader Armey, when both the Democratic
House and Senate suspected that President Lyndon
Johnson had lied to them about the incident(s) in
the Gulf of Tonkin that provoked Congress to
authorize the war in Viet Nam, they took action. In
contrast, Republicans have not acted on Cheney's lie
to Armey - and surely Washington Post
reporter Barton Gellman is not the first person to
learn about this lie.

Why Cheney Is Not
Likely To Be Held Accountable

Those of us who
follow these matters have long known - and I have
written before - that it is Dick Cheney who is
molding his hapless and naive president to his will,
by effecting endless expansions of Presidential
powers, and acting upon Cheney's total disregard of
the separation of powers.

Cheney does not seem
to believe the Constitution applies to "real
leaders," who do whatever they believe they must do.
Nor does he believe in the separation of powers.
Indeed, Cheney absurdly claims he is himself part of
the Legislative Branch because he is the presiding
officer of the Senate - though, in practice, that
position exists only to break tie votes. It has long
been clear that Cheney has been corruptly bridging
the constitutional separation of powers throughout
the Bush/Cheney presidency.

If Armey is right,
Dick Cheney has not only behaved improperly, but
also criminally: In addition, when lying to Armey,
Cheney clearly committed a "high crime or
misdemeanor" in his blocking the Constitution's
checks and balances from stopping our march into
Iraq. During the debates that took place during the
Constitution's ratification conventions, it was
specifically stated that lying to Congress about
matters of war would be an impeachable offense.
Congress has also made it a crime.

Nonetheless, nothing
is likely to happen to Cheney, for Congress is too
busy dealing with the disastrous economy that he and
Bush are leaving behind as they head for the door.
No one seems inclined to hold Cheney responsible,
and he appears totally unconcerned about the wrath
of history. Yet in lying even to those in his own
party, about reasons to go to war, he has sunk to a
low level few have reached, and it is no hyperbole
to call his actions treasonous to the structure and
spirit of the Republic.

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